In modern broadcasting systems like television it is at certain circumstances desirable not to reproduce the audio tracks as the sound engineer designed them, but rather do perform special adjustments to address constraints given at rendering time. A well-known technology to control such post-production adjustments is to provide appropriate metadata along with those audio tracks.
Traditional sound reproduction systems, e.g. old home television systems, consist of one loudspeaker or a stereo pair of loudspeakers. More sophisticated multichannel reproduction systems use five or even more loudspeakers.
If multichannel reproduction systems are considered, sound engineers can be much more flexible in placing single sources in a two-dimensional plane and therefore may also use a higher dynamic range for their overall audio tracks, since voice intelligibility is much easier due to the well-known cocktail party effect.
However, those realistic, high dynamical sounds may cause problems on traditional reproduction systems. There may be scenarios where a consumer may not want this high dynamic signal, be it because she or he is listening to the content in a noisy environment (e.g. in a driving car or with an in-flight or mobile entertainment system), she or he is wearing hearing aids or she or he does not want to disturb her or his neighbors (late at night for example).
Furthermore, broadcasters face the problem that different items in one program (e.g. commercials) may be at different loudness levels due to different crest factors requiring level adjustment of consecutive items.
In a classical broadcast transmission chain the end user receives the already mixed audio track. Any further manipulation on receiver side may be done only in a very limited form. Currently a small feature set of Dolby metadata allows the user to modify some property of the audio signal.
Usually, manipulations based on the above mentioned metadata is applied without any frequency selective distinction, since the metadata traditionally attached to the audio signal does not provide sufficient information to do so.
Furthermore, only the whole audio stream itself can be manipulated. Additionally, there is no way to adopt and separate each audio object inside this audio stream. Especially in improper listening environments, this may be unsatisfactory.
In the midnight mode, it is impossible for the current audio processor to distinguish between ambience noises and dialog because of missing guiding information. Therefore, in case of high level noises (which must be compressed/limited in loudness), also dialogs will be manipulated in parallel. This might be harmful for speech intelligibility.
Increasing the dialog level compared to the ambient sound helps to improve the perception of speech specially for hearing impaired people. This technique only works if the audio signal is really separated in dialog and ambient components on the receiver side in addition with property control information. If only a stereo downmix signal is available no further separation can be applied anymore to distinguish and manipulate the speech information separately.
Current downmix solutions allow a dynamic stereo level tuning for center and surround channels. But for any variant loudspeaker configuration instead of stereo there is no real description from the transmitter how to downmix the final multi-channel audio source. Only a default formula inside the decoder performs the signal mix in a very inflexible way.
In all described scenarios, generally two different approaches exist. The first approach is that, when generating the audio signal to be transmitted, a set of audio objects is downmixed into a mono, stereo or a multichannel signal. This signal which is to be transmitted to a user of this signal via broadcast, via any other transmission protocol or via distribution on a computer-readable storage medium normally has a number of channels which is smaller than the number of original audio objects which were downmixed by a sound engineer for example in a studio environment. Furthermore, metadata can be attached in order to allow several different modifications, but these modifications can only be applied to the whole transmitted signal or, if the transmitted signal has several different transmitted channels, to individual transmitted channels as a whole. Since, however, such transmitted channels are always superpositions of several audio objects, an individual manipulation of a certain audio object, while a further audio object is not manipulated is not possible at all.
The other approach is to not perform the object downmix, but to transmit the audio object signals as they are as separate transmitted channels. Such a scenario works well, when the number of audio objects is small. When, for example, only five audio objects exist, then it is possible to transmit these five different audio objects separately from each other within a 5.1 scenario. Metadata can be associated with these channels which indicate the specific nature of an object/channel. Then, on the receiver side, the transmitted channels can be manipulated based on the transmitted metadata.
A disadvantage of this approach is that it is not backward-compatible and does only work well in the context of a small number of audio objects. When the number of audio objects increases, the bitrate required for transmitting all objects as separate explicit audio tracks rapidly increases. This increasing bitrate is specifically not useful in the context of broadcast applications.
Therefore current bitrate efficient approaches do not allow an individual manipulation of distinct audio objects. Such an individual manipulation is only allowed when one would transmit each object separately. This approach, however, is not bitrate efficient and is, therefore, not feasible specifically in broadcast scenarios.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a bitrate efficient but flexible solution to these problems.
In accordance with the first aspect of the present invention this object is achieved by Apparatus for generating at least one audio output signal representing a superposition of at least two different audio objects, comprising: a processor for processing an audio input signal to provide an object representation of the audio input signal, in which the at least two different audio objects are separated from each other, the at least two different audio objects are available as separate audio object signals, and the at least two different audio objects are manipulatable independently from each other; an object manipulator for manipulating the audio object signal or a mixed audio object signal of at least one audio object based on audio object based metadata referring to the at least one audio object to obtain a manipulated audio object signal or a manipulated mixed audio object signal for the at least one audio object; and an object mixer for mixing the object representation by combining the manipulated audio object with an unmodified audio object or with a manipulated different audio object manipulated in a different way as the at least one audio object.
In accordance with a second aspect of the present invention, this object is achieved by this Method of generating at least one audio output signal representing a superposition of at least two different audio objects, comprising: processing an audio input signal to provide an object representation of the audio input signal, in which the at least two different audio objects are separated from each other, the at least two different audio objects are available as separate audio object signals, and the at least two different audio objects are manipulatable independently from each other; manipulating the audio object signal or a mixed audio object signal of at least one audio object based on audio object based metadata referring to the at least one audio object to obtain a manipulated audio object signal or a manipulated mixed audio object signal for the at least one audio object; and mixing the object representation by combining the manipulated audio object with an unmodified audio object or with a manipulated different audio object manipulated in a different way as the at least one audio object.
In accordance with a third aspect of the present invention, this object is achieved by an apparatus for generating an encoded audio signal representing a superposition of at least two different audio objects, comprising: a data stream formatter for formatting a data stream so that the data stream comprises an object downmix signal representing a combination of the at least two different audio objects, and, as side information, metadata referring to at least one of the different audio objects.
In accordance with a fourth aspect of the present invention, this object is achieved by a method of generating an encoded audio signal representing a superposition of at least two different audio objects, comprising: formatting a data stream so that the data stream comprises an object downmix signal representing a combination of the at least two different audio objects, and, as side information, metadata referring to at least one of the different audio objects.
Further aspects of the present invention refer to computer programs implementing the inventive methods and a computer-readable storage medium having stored thereon an object downmix signal and, as side information, object parameter data and metadata for one or more audio objects included in the object downmix signal.
The present invention is based on the finding that an individual manipulation of separate audio object signals or separate sets of mixed audio object signals allows an individual object-related processing based on object-related metadata. In accordance with the present invention, the result of the manipulation is not directly output to a loudspeaker, but is provided to an object mixer, which generates output signals for a certain rendering scenario, where the output signals are generated by a superposition of at least one manipulated object signal or a set of mixed object signals together with other manipulated object signals and/or an unmodified object signal. Naturally, it is not necessary to manipulate each object, but, in some instances, it can be sufficient to only manipulate one object and to not manipulate a further object of the plurality of audio objects. The result of the object mixing operation is one or a plurality of audio output signals, which are based on manipulated objects. These audio output signals can be transmitted to loudspeakers or can be stored for further use or can even be transmitted to a further receiver depending on the specific application scenario.
Preferably, the signal input into the inventive manipulation/mixing device is a downmix signal generated by downmixing a plurality of audio object signals. The downmix operation can be meta-data controlled for each object individually or can be uncontrolled such as be the same for each object. In the former case, the manipulation of the object in accordance with the metadata is the object controlled individual and object-specific upmix operation, in which a speaker component signal representing this object is generated. Preferably, spatial object parameters are provided as well, which can be used for reconstructing the original signals by approximated versions thereof using the transmitted object downmix signal. Then, the processor for processing an audio input signal to provide an object representation of the audio input signal is operative to calculate reconstructed versions of the original audio object based on the parametric data, where these approximated object signals can then be individually manipulated by object-based metadata.
Preferably, object rendering information is provided as well, where the object rendering information includes information on the intended audio reproduction setup and information on the positioning of the individual audio objects within the reproduction scenario. Specific embodiments, however, can also work without such object-location data. Such configurations are, for example, the provision of stationary object positions, which can be fixedly set or which can be negotiated between a transmitter and a receiver for a complete audio track.